Lucent Digital Radio Announces Plans to Test Its Digital Audio Broadcast System

Business Wire, Oct 14, 1998

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 1998--Lucent Digital Radio, a new venture of Lucent Technologies, announced today that it will commence field testing on its In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) digital audio broadcast (DAB) systems in early 1999. Currently in development, the Lucent Digital Radio IBOC systems will be tested through the end of 1999, by which time the AM and FM IBOC systems are expected to be fully developed and tested.

The testing cycles will begin with the Lucent Digital Radio FM system, and will later include testing of the company's AM IBOC system in the mid-year 1999 time frame.

"Digital audio broadcast is an extension of the world's digital communications revolution that we're leading," said Suren Pai, president of Lucent Digital Radio. "The creative strengths of Bell Labs, coupled with Lucent's global networking expertise, will help lead us into the future of radio broadcasting."

Lucent's IBOC system will greatly enhance sound quality for AM radio and near-CD quality for FM radio and provide interference-free reception and innovative new data services (e.g., song titles shown on a radio display). The system also will provide broadcasters with a low-cost transition path to digital technology, creating the potential for new revenue opportunities.

IBOC uses existing radio spectrum allocations -- no new allocations or auctions are required. IBOC DAB is both backward- and forward-compatible, meaning that current AM/FM receivers will not be affected. And when a station elects to turn off the analog signal in the future, IBOC DAB-compatible receivers will operate with the remaining all-digital signal.

Lucent Digital Radio draws on several patented Lucent digital audio and channel coding techniques that provide robust digital signal recovery, including:

- Lucent's Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC(tm)) technology, which delivers near-CD quality audio at 96 kilobits per second (kbps)

- Complementary Punctured-Pair Convolutional Codes (CPPC), which optimally combines digital information, and

- An improvement on the Viterbi Algorithm

These audio and channel coding techniques have been optimized to overcome the significant technical challenges presented in dealing with the real-world broadcast environment.

"Lucent Digital Radio will begin large-scale testing of a system design to turn IBOC into commercially-viable products for the marketplace," said Alan Pate, director of technology planning for Lucent Digital Radio. "We will start hard-core testing in multiple environments to measure the robustness of our system. The key to the success of IBOC is the integration of audio and channel coding technologies into a system that can effectively resist multipath and interference conditions.

Lucent's IBOC technology places both high-capacity digital and analog signals within the existing spectrum. The IBOC approach will allow broadcasters to rapidly introduce digital sound to listeners on their current dial positions using existing transmitters and antennas.

Lucent Technologies and its research and development unit, Bell Laboratories, have been leaders in the digital encoding of information used in communications systems, and have been at the forefront of DAB technology for the past decade. Bell Labs has developed and patented several technologies for the DAB market, including the Perceptual Audio Coding (PAC(tm)) algorithm. The PAC encoder converts AM or FM radio signals into high quality digital signals.

There are more than 12,000 radio stations in the United States (AM and FM combined), and Americans own more than 500 million radios, on average, more than 5 per household. About 40 million radios are sold in the U.S. each year.

DAB systems are expected to become commercially available starting in 2000. This migration to digital radio presents a sizable opportunity for the consumer electronics industry and will enable radio broadcasters to provide improved services to listeners.

Lucent Digital Radio is the second Lucent venture in the digital broadcast market. Lucent Digital Video, announced in January, 1998, markets its industry-leading MPEG-2 encoders to the broadcast, cable, wireless cable, fiber optic and satellite markets. For more information about Lucent Digital Radio, visit the Web site at www.lucent.com/ldr.> Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit the company's web site at www.lucent.com